How to Sell Fitness…Backwards?

I just had a total epiphany: I know exactly what you’ve been doing wrong in your fitness selling and I know EXACTLY how to turn you around and set you on the path to closing 9 of every 10 leads.

If you’re struggling to close clients in your sales presentations…you need to take what you’re doing now and flip it backwards.

Let me take a guess about how you talk about fitness currently. In fact, let me paint a picture for you:

A stranger comes up to you (maybe not even in a sales context, just casually) and they ask you why you think fitness is important.

Most likely you start with the results. You explain that fitness helped you find your confidence, or how it helped you solve a health issue, or how you just really love staying in shape.

The stranger is genuinely interested in your opinion, so they stick around to hear more. This gets you to loosen up and “nerd out” a little bit about your specific approach to fitness. You explain how much fun you have doing it, and you’re clearly having fun just talking about it.

So then you say “Not really, I love it so much that it’s easy for me!”

In other words, you’re explaining your love of fitness with the following structure:

Results > Fun > Easy

That may be a safe bet for a casual conversation (or maybe not, since you should Always Be Selling) but it’s not a good selling strategy.

You know what IS a good strategy for selling fitness?

Easy > Fun > Results

Allow me to explain…

A Quick Note

I want to be very clear here that right now I’m talking about SELLING, not marketing. For marketing, you do want results to be the center of attention. That’s what gets leads to come in through your front door.

Turning those leads into clients, though, requires a different structure:

Easy > Fun > Results

Follow this structure and you’ll know how to sell fitness like a true closer – you’ll turn 9 out of every 10 leads into CLIENTS.

Easy

The first and most obvious fear that most people have about joining a fitness program is the fear that the workouts will be too hard.

Of course, nobody will ever admit that out loud, since nobody wants to look like a wimp, so you don’t want to wait for this to come up as an objection.

Instead, attack it head-on, right at the start of your presentation.

You can start by simply priming your prospect with words like “simple” and “easy” peppered in to the conversation. Ask them to fill out your “simple” ParQ sheet. Tell them you hope they had an “easy” time finding you.

Then, once you’ve walked through the ParQ together and figured what their pain points are, reassure them that these are all EASY problems to solve.

In fact, you can even tell them that you’ve seen people walk in with far worse problems and still have an easy time getting in shape.

Of course, you and I know that getting in shape is never “easy” in the strictest sense, but more on that later.

What’s the best way to make something look easy? Well…

Fun

You make it look fun!

How does Tom Sawyer trick his friends into painting the fence for him? He makes it look fun!

Now that’s not to say you’re “tricking” your prospects…but you certainly are trying to MOTIVATE them to do something they normally wouldn’t want to do.

And the source of fun is really quite simple…it’s you.

You LOVE fitness right? Well now is the time to SHOW IT! Get hyped! Bounce around the room! Get yourself so high-energy that you become contagious and your prospect can’t help but feel it too.

This is the part where it’s okay for you to “nerd out” a little bit. There’s something magical that happens in a person’s face when they talk about something they love: their eyes light up, and their whole face turns bigger and friendlier. That’s exactly the kind of effect you want to include here.

But of course, life doesn’t always leave you happy and full of energy. Sometimes you have a sales presentation coming up and you just aren’t in the mood.

So how do you prepare for this?

You rehearse!

AND, you create a ritual for yourself before every sales presentation (or if you’re batch processing, every block of presentations). Take 5-15 minutes to meditate, listen to music, or do whatever you can do that instantly puts you in your “happy place.”

Seriously, the energy you bring into each sale is crucially important. Take good care of it and take good care of yourself, because that will give you the greatest chance of success.

Results

To explain this part, I need to dip into the world of storytelling for a moment.

In the structure I’ve laid out for you, results are really the ending of your story. They are the big, flashy, exciting part that you’ve been building up to the whole time.

Ah, but story endings are weird. They’re full of paradoxes.

To begin with, there’s the well-researched fact that people only commit four things to memory in any story or experience. They remember the beginning, the greatest emotional high, the greatest emotional low, and the ending. That’s it.

So with that in mind, you’d think the ending of any great story could stand on it’s own, right? If it’s already one of the most memorable scenes, why not just leap right to it?

But people don’t like when you do that! They get all mad at you and call it a “spoiler.” If you listen to what the internet has to stay, spoilers are apparently the worst thing ever.

…Except that they’re not.

See, there’s another piece of research that shows that people actually enjoy a story MORE when they’ve had the ending spoiled for them, not less. The theory goes that a spoiled story frees up the viewer’s mind to go with the flow and enjoy the story as a whole instead of trying to guess ahead to the ending, which is a distracting process.

Now, what does all this have to do with your sales presentation? I’ll explain.

The weird truth about results is that they aren’t very exciting in isolation. They only become exciting when they’re wrapped up in a story.

This is true even when the results are out-of-this-world good. You could run around town telling people that you just lost 100 pounds and most people would look at you and say “That’s great! But how did you do it?”

That’s just another way of saying “Please tell me a story!”

The reason why is simple: deep down, everyone already knows what it takes to get in shape. Work hard, eat right, and stay consistent. Every successful fitness plan is some variation on that. And when you put it that plainly, it’s boring. Incredibly important, but boring.

And THAT is why your job as a salesperson is to turn fitness into a wonderful story for your clients to step into.

Make sense?

If you want a quick recap to help this all stick in your mind, check out this video:

Committed to your success,

Bedros

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* The advertised results of the success stories on this page and throughout this site are only typical of people who worked really hard and followed every fitness marketing tactic I've outlined in the products they purchase from me. Results may vary.